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To Move or Not To Move: The Economics of Cloud Computing
Full text linkAbstract Cloud-based hosting promises cost advantages over conventional in-house (on-premise) application deployment. One important question when considering a move to the cloud is whether it makes sense for 'my' application to migrate to the cloud. This question is challenging to answer due to following reasons. Although many potential benefits of migrating to the cloud can be enumerated, some benefits may not apply to my application. Also, there can be multiple ways in which an application might make use of the facilities offered by cloud providers. Answering these questions requires an in-depth understanding of the cost implications of all the possible choices specific to 'my' circumstances. In this study We identify an initial set of key factors affecting the costs of a deployement choice. Using benchmarks representing two different applications (TPC-W and TPC-E) we investigate the evolution of costs for different deployment choices. We show that application characteristics such as workload intensity, growth rate, storage capacity and software licensing costs produce complex combined effect on overall costs. We also discuss issues regarding workload variance and horizontal partitioning
An Open-Label Study of Aripiprazole in Children with a Bipolar Disorder
Full text linkAbstract Objective: The purpose of this open-label study was to describe the effectiveness of aripiprazole (APZ) in the treatment of children with bipolar disorders suffering from manic symptomatology. Method: Symptomatic outpatients (Young Mania Rating Scale [YMRS] score !15) meeting strict, unmodified, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, diagnostic symptom criteria for a bipolar disorder, ages 4-9 years, were eligible. Subjects were treated prospectively with flexible doses of APZ (maximum daily dose of 15 mg/day), for up to 16 weeks or until a priori response criteria were met. Outcome measures included the YMRS, Clinical Global Impressions ScaleSeverity, Children's Global Assessment Scale (CGAS), and the Children's Depression Rating Scale-Revised (CDRS-R). A priori response criteria consisted of 3 of 4 consecutive weeks with (1) CDRS-R <29; (2) YMRS <10; and (3) CGAS >50. Results: Ninety-six children (62 males; mean age of 6.9 (SD ¼ 1.7), received APZ for an average length of treatment of 12.5 (SD ¼ 3.9) weeks. Significant improvements in YMRS, CDRS-R, CGAS, and Clinical Global Impressions Scale-Severity scores ( p < 0.001) were noted at the end of study participation. Sixty of the subjects (62.5%) met a priori response criteria at study's end. The most common side effects noted were stomachache, increased appetite, and headache. Two subjects were removed from the study due to side effects [epistaxis (n ¼ 1); akathisia (n ¼ 1)]. Subjects experienced an average weight gain of 2.4 (SD ¼ 1.9) kg. Conclusion: APZ may be effective in the acute treatment of symptoms of children with bipolar illnesses
Production of Nereis diversicolor O. F. Miiller (Polychaeta) in a Shallow Brackish-water Pond
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Full text linkABSTRACT: Remote laboratories increasingly have been used in engineering and science education as a complementary tool to traditional proximal laboratories. In some cases, they replace real laboratories to enable students' access to otherwise unavailable or unique equipment and facilities, or to expose students to a unique educational experience. Such a unique experience is an opportunity to collaborate over the Internet with other students either in the same city, the same country or internationally. The latter case adds an extra dimension to the development of communication and collaboration skills required to conduct technical experiments on real components, instruments and systems. Challenges may arise due to different culture, language and learning habits. This paper reports on the authors' and their students' experiences with international collaboration in the remote laboratory NetLab. These experiences are compared with feedback provided by domestic students and observation of their performance by supervising academics. Preliminary recommendations are formulated for effective international collaboration in remote laboratories
Marques
No full textAbstract A large body of literature pointed out the great importance of the role of women in the rural development process to guarantee the commercial farm survival. Indeed, the women's management -in particular for family-run farms -proved to have a notable capacity to seize new opportunities of income and great skills in the management regeneration offered by new links with society and rural areas. At the same time, the women's management often meets opposition with the persistence of cultural factors reflecting a chauvinist approach; such opposition is more likely to occur in a territorial contest characterized by socio-economic marginalization. In this sense, an overriding objective of the European policy for rural development is to support the overcoming of such restrictions, by implementing the female enterprise in rural areas -connected or not to agricultural activities -or by promoting the women's interest within the local network and the formal-informal institutions that preside over governance systems. The goal of this paper is to deepen the dynamics that have characterized the women's management in Italian rural areas, in particular in the region of Lazium, under three different scenarios. First of all, we analyze the evolution of family and structural typologies related to farms consulting the Italian agricultural census data; we investigate the type of relationship existing between family and farm. Secondly, relating to policy use, we examine investments made by an unbiased sample of regional, women-run farms that benefited from the Rural Development Plan (RDP) by the Lazium Regional Government. Lastly, using survey data collected on farm, we address our effort to improve our understanding of the main socio-economic conditioning factors that could affect the women's management performance
Risk Analysis Factors of the Emission in Transportation A Case Study-Dubai Taxi
Full text linkABSTRACT Increasing number of traditional vehicles threaten the economical development, pollutes our air and creating environmental hazards. Urban areas in UAE are currently facing growing traffic congestion by rising air pollution as a result of vast growth of population and consequently number of vehicles in the last twenty years. The spotlight of this study is to identify the critical risk factors that can be used to assess the impact of transportation emission on overall environmental risk. In this study risk analysis factors in transportation system focuses on Dubai Taxi fleet as a case study. The most critical emission levels are from; Carbon monoxide (CO), Nitrogen oxide (NOx) and Hydrocarbons (HC), which will be analyzed. The objective is to develop a sustainable transportation planning will help to solve this problem. The approach is based on a comprehensive assessment to address the negative effect of the vehicles on the environment at different period of times. The research considers different solution for the pollution problem by using a proposed model to evaluate and test its effectiveness within the international standard of air emission regardless of the vehicles or population growth in the future
Computational homogenization of microfractured continua using weakly periodic boundary conditions
Full text linkAbstract Computational homogenization of elastic media with stationary cracks is considered, whereby the macroscale stress is obtained by solving a boundary value problem on a Statistical Volume Element (SVE) and the cracks are represented by means of the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM). With the presence of cracks on the microscale, conventional BCs (Dirichlet, Neumann, strong periodic) perform poorly, in particular when cracks intersect the SVE boundary. As a remedy, we herein propose to use a mixed variational format to impose periodic boundary conditions in a weak sense on the SVE. Within this framework, we develop a novel traction approximation that is suitable when cracks intersect the SVE boundary. Our main result is the proposition of a stable traction approximation that is piecewise constant between crack-boundary intersections. In particular, we prove analytically that the proposed approximation is stable in terms of the LBB (inf-sup) condition and illustrate the stability properties with a numerical example. We emphasize that the stability analysis is carried out within the setting of weakly periodic boundary conditions, but it also applies to other mixed problems with similar structure, e.g. contact problems. The numerical ex- * Corresponding author. Email address: [email protected] (Erik Svenning) Preprint submitted to Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. November 18, 2015 amples show that the proposed traction approximation is more efficient than conventional boundary conditions (Dirichlet, Neumann, strong periodic) in terms of convergence with increasing SVE size